FAILDEX失樂園
中文
← Back to archive

Meetro

The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.

Event year2008

01 / WHAT IT BUILT

What the company did

Meetro was a location-based instant messaging service created by Meetroduction, LLC, founded in October 2004 by Paul Bragiel and Wendell Davis. It combined traditional instant messaging - supporting AIM, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ - with automatic local buddy finding, figuring out where users were physically and showing who was nearby in real time. The small team famously lived and worked out of the same house, first in Chicago and then Palo Alto. The service closed after the team decided to focus on their forum-hosting project, Lefora.

02 / Meetro FAILURE REASONS

Failure reasons

Meetro failed because a good product could not capture enough market share. In his postmortem, founder Paul Bragiel wrote that despite a robust product - one of the first location-based social networks, with rule-based grouping of nearby people, nearby restaurant and media discovery - they simply could not win enough users. The chicken-and-egg problem of a social network was compounded by a confusing identity: users had to create a whole new identity and convince friends to do the same, when all their existing contacts were already on AIM or MSN.

03 / EVENT HISTORY

Events in the structured record

  1. Founded

    Paul Bragiel and Wendell Davis founded Meetroduction, LLC in October 2004 and built Meetro.

  2. Launched

    Meetro launched as a location-based IM client for Windows, later adding a Mac alpha; press coverage included a front-page San Francisco Chronicle story.

  3. Shutdown

    Meetro was shut down; the team terminated the project to focus on Lefora, and founder Paul Bragiel published a postmortem on TechCrunch in May 2008.

04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT

Difficulty of rebuilding this project today

Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.

Rebuild difficultyPending assessmentNot completed
Scoring basisNot completed
ScalabilityPending assessmentNot completed
Scoring basisNot completed

Overall assessment: Not completed

05 / CAUSAL CHAIN

How the factors connect

  1. 01

    Meetroduction, LLC founded October 2004 by Paul Bragiel and Wendell Davis; Chicago then Palo Alto.

  2. 02

    Location-based IM: multi-protocol (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ) + automatic local buddy finding.

  3. 03

    One of the first location-based social networks; rule-based grouping of nearby users.

  4. 04

    Could not capture enough market share despite a robust product.

  5. 05

    Shut down; team moved to forum-hosting project Lefora (codenamed Makaha).

  6. 06

    Founder published a postmortem ('Anatomy Of A Failure') on TechCrunch in May 2008.

  7. 07

    No reliable loss figure disclosed.